The Boston startup and technology scene is full of wildly successful leaders and entrepreneurs. Some have been at it for years and are big reasons why the Boston tech scene is thriving today. Others are just getting going. Those who fall in the latter aspire to walk the path of the former and build the next Endeca, Kayak, HubSpot… or Akamai.
One name that is not often heard among the likes of Steve Papa, Diane Hessan or Dharmesh Shah is Julia Austin, who, while relatively new to the current Boston startup scene is anything but when it comes to the booming business of technology.
GET TO KNOW JULIA AUSTIN
Julia Austin, born and raised in Massachusetts, doesn’t have the typical educational pedigree of most tech moguls. She holds an art degree from UMass Amherst and a Masters degree in Management Information Systems from Boston University. No Harvard, MIT or PhD. This, however, is only where the uniqueness of her wild career ride begins.
Austin’s early career days were spent in IT, mainly in the healthcare industry. She had a two-year stint at PWC [Coopers & Lybrand – before PWC merger] between her time with Tufts New England Medical Center (NEMC) and Partners Healthcare. It was at Partners where she truly came to love whatever was “hot” in technology. While there, she played a key role in building out a Just in Time materials delivery system for the hospitals with PeopleSoft, which had just come on the scene at the time.
In 1999, Austin was introduced to a young company out of MIT called Akamai, who at the time had roughly 50 employees. After a few weeks in discussion, Austin, who had just had her second child, joined Akamai as one of the first 200 employees, just weeks before the company’s IPO.
Sitting with Austin inside a quaint coffee shop near her Cambridge residence, she recalled her early days at Akamai:
“Early on, I was constantly seeking out new ways to add value to demonstrate that I could strengthen the business without losing our agility and startup culture.”
As Akamai’s very first Release Manager, Austin had been harping on the company to implement an “agile like” process to ensure they “didn’t break the internet.” Well, eventually they did break the Internet (well, a big chunk of it, anyway) and the founding team turned to Austin to implement her plan. This eventually led to her assuming the role of VP of Engineering and managing 400 people across four offices, including three in California.
Then, on September 11, 2001, tragedy struck the United States, and Akamai, directly, as co-founder Daniel Lewin was killed on American Airlines Flight 11. This, of course, was a difficult time for the entire company.
For Akamai, and much of America, things took a turn for the worse after 9/11. The company went through massive layoffs, going from close to 2000 employees down to just hundreds. Austin herself had the unfortunate task of executing much of those layoffs. The company, of course, rebounded and is still thriving today.
After having her third child, Austin left Akamai in October of 2002 and took some time off to, as she put it, “spend time with my children and pay it forward.” She served on various school boards and consulted with several organizations.
RETURN TO TECH
In January of 2004 Hopkinton-based, EMC acquired Palo Alto-based, VMware. Approximately a year later the company, struggling to hire top tech talent, lured Austin in to open a VMware office in Cambridge. After nearly three years away from a true workforce, Austin was back in action leading a technology company.
“At the time, VMware had about 800 employees mainly in CA, but we launched in Cambridge with just myself, an IT guy and a recruiter.”
Boston’s tech scene in 2005 was nothing like it is now. VMware quickly became the place-to-be for students coming out of MIT and other local universities. “We were the only Silicon Valley game in town,” Austin said. In a matter of a few months they added 20 people and the rapid growth continued from there.
The early days and team of VMware East
As VMware began to establish a strong east coast presence, Austin was tasked with leading the company’s academic program, mainly investing in research. In addition, VMware began to expand their engineering organization globally. To support various international research programs and ensure consistency across all global engineering sites, Austin was promoted to head of Global R&D. She traveled to VMware’s global offices and international university campuses. “I got to see some incredible parts of the world I would never had seen otherwise.”
Being engrained in the company’s research initiatives, Austin began to push more innovation internally. Given some capital by VMware co-founders Diane Green and Mendel Rosenblum, she co-founded the Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP) solution – “a startup within the company,” Austin described it, which was a thin layer of software embedded on a mobile phone that enabled enterprises to support “BYOD” for employee phones and make corporate phones easier to manage.
Continuing down the path of intrapreneurship, she would also go on to launch RADIO - R&D Innovation Off-Site conference - that gave engineers the opportunity to show off their ideas and creations to each other and the executive team at VMware. The conference still takes place today and Austin says a lot of significant projects have stemmed from this annual event.
After eight years with VMware, and with the company on their third CEO since her arrival, Austin decided to step down from her role as Vice President of Innovation in June 2013.
“We grew from 800 to 15,000 in those eight years. It was an incredible run and I was happy with what we accomplished, but for me, it was just the right time to move on.”
THE NEXT CHAPTER - STARTUPS
Having left VMware without any specific ambitions, let alone a plan, Austin immediately plugged into the startup community and met Katie Rae, then the Managing Director of Techstars Boston, Andy Palmer (Koa Labs and CEO of Tamr), Micahel Skok (formerly of Northbridge Venture Partners) and several other key players in the tech scene. These connections led Austin into a world, a part of Boston, she hadn’t realized had exploded while she was heads down at VMware.
Next week, in part two of this profile, we’ll look at Austin’s move into the Boston startup ecosystem, her role as an advisor and mentor, investments she’s made as well has hear her thoughts on the current state of venture capital in Boston and the omnipresent topic of women in tech.
Josh Boyle is Director of Community & Marketing, VentureFizz. You can follow him on Twitter @jb_sid
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